Any photographer will tell you, the same thing can seem completely different if you look at it from the other side. 1984 is claimed by left and right as a polemic against the ‘surveillance society’. Orwell was clear; he was a socialist writer. That hasn’t stopped American right-wing libertarians from using the imagery of the novel for their conspiracy theories about for example, how Barrack Obama is ‘Big Brutha’ planning a dangerous socialist future for the US of A. (You get which side I’m coming from.)
Today my latest eBay acquisition arrived – a 1951 US paperback edition with a pulp fiction cover and blurb that puts a spin on the storyline that’s a bit different to most interpretations. It doesn’t say ‘dystopia’ once, but instead describes, “Forbidden love and terror in a world many of us may live to see!”
Can’t help noticing on this cover what seems to be more of a homoerotic sub-text than a communist one, and I don’t remember the leather clad wrestler character either. If you’ve seen the 1956 Edmond O’Brien version, (here it’s poster asks, “Will Ecstasy Be A Crime?”) you will get the message that the proles want more sex and less politics in their entertainments. If there is a future, it lies with the proles.
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